Presentation by: Linda Zenzen, Lisa Ego
Session: E | Time: 11:05AM – 11:45AM | Location: Room 206
What does mentoring look like in your school? What is your school doing to support new, early career and new-to-position teachers? How can we use mentoring to best support our colleagues at the school level? These are the burning questions that we would like to address in this roundtable discussion. Lisa and I are both very passionate about supporting teacher mentorship and helping new teachers to build confidence and effective teaching practices to ultimately improve student achievement. We have seen a significant amount of change in our district over the last few years with regards to expectations placed on our new teachers. With such a teacher shortage, most of our new teachers are spending very little time on the TTOC list or short contracts and therefore, are not getting to experience a gradual transition to the role of full-time contract teacher. Instead, most of them are required to move right into a full-time position, often with many different courses/preps and subject areas in which they are not trained. As experienced teachers, we feel that we need to provide ongoing support for our new colleagues so they can thrive and continue to bring enthusiasm and optimism to our school. There are a lot of excellent teachers in our school and we value their knowledge. Our school mentoring committee is working to utilize teacher leadership within our school model to build a culture of collaboration. This practice encourages individual professional growth for our new teachers as well as for our seasoned teachers. However, we still wonder if there is something different or new that we can do to better support new, early career and new-to-position teachers at our school.
Abstract: 586